Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, coming to you every Tuesday from 12 to 1245, the show where we answer all of your cooking related questions. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues, and I'm here with uh Nastasha. Call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Today's show is being brought to you by TechServe for all of your Macintosh-related technical needs.
They're at www.techserve.com, Tech with a K. And uh uh they're actually they're the sponsor, but they're giving away basically their time here uh to talk about the Lower East Side Ecology Center. And the Lower East Side Ecology Center is having its eighth annual uh after the holidays e-waste event uh with uh ten events uh in January. And uh to find out where and when you know when they are, they're in the Lower East Side, which is where I live. Go to uh LES, that's like Lower East Side Ecology Center.org.
And they're gonna help uh, you know, put good use to all the equipment that you're gonna throw away after you get your new equipment uh after the holidays, right, Nastasha, something like that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, by the way, uh it it came to me through the grapevine uh that uh some listeners of the show believe that I somehow prevent Nastasha from speaking on uh on the radio. In fact, uh this is not the case.
I want all of your readers to know that I would be happy to have Nastasha speak more on the radio. It's that she she particularly does not want me to make her uh speak on the radio, so I might make her do some today just to prove that I am not purposely trying to hog all of the all of the air time. You know, you don't really those of you out there probably don't really know Nastasha that well. She likes to be kind of the the puppet master person in the background, you know, manipulating dials and wheels, doesn't like so much to uh to speak. She'll believe me.
Believe me, when we are not on the radio, she more than makes up for speaking her mind. All right? I'll just put it that way. What do you think, Nastasha? Any any comments?
Yes, that's true. Yeah. All right. Well, in in the light of trying to get you to say more, we had an email response. By the way, for those of you that didn't listen last time or any time, you know, uh, we are uh, you know, basically a meat eating uh folk, we're a meat eating crew.
I lost a bet uh about uh that you know someone couldn't produce uh any raw chocolate that I would find even remotely palatable. I lost this bet. And as a result, uh I'm gonna have to uh and Nastasha decided to join me, although she doesn't have to. Uh I'm going to cook and eat, well, cook. I'm going to prepare and eat a raw uh you know raw food diet for a week, probably sometime in late January or February.
Um, uh last week I had said that maybe I would just do, you know, I could eat like raw fish. That's raw, right? Technically raw. And then uh someone uh emailed us uh you know a response to that, basically calling us giant sissies. Um more me, because Nastasha hadn't said anything because of course I never allow her to speak.
So you want to re read the uh read the email there. This comes from Pablo Escollar. The cooking issues team. I think you should go raw vegan because one, the raw chocolate bar you ate was mostly like was most most likely raw vegan. Two, it's typically what it meant by raw foods.
Three, it would be awesome to see how you innovate inside of these constraints. Four, a diet where you can eat raw meat and fish for a week just doesn't sound that hard. That's it, right? And it's hard. And he had the one request.
Right. And then as far as the writing goes, I think if you do make it about personal experience, my only advice is don't make it sound too much like a post apocalyptic survivor story. Well Pablo, if it if if we don't make it sound like a post apocalyptic survivor story, it won't be like any other day in our lives. You had to visit us sometime, Pablo. And see we literally live in kind of a a small closet hole with no windows.
So we don't like the the entire world could have crumbled around us and all we'll know is like the the piled up mass of junk and equipment that that we live in in this tiny closet. So our normal lives i you know you know is basically that a post apocalyptic problem. So it won't have anything to do with the raw food but it might have that tone anyway, right Nastash well he also says he tried to do it for a week and it's pretty hard especially in New York in winter. Oh, because you can't get the good uh the good fruits and whatnot well we could do it. It'll do it.
You know i it i it's just gonna take a lot a lot of research and that's the reason I have to put it off for so long uh is I'm gonna have to read you know basically every book I can find on the subject 'cause that's you know that's the way that's the way I roll Nastasha's rolling her eyes because she knows it's gonna be a huge pain in her behind. But I agree with you Paul uh Pablo rather and uh sorry and uh we will do it we will do raw vegan because you're correct it's more of a challenge and why not take on the challenge. Uh I told my wife this uh last night she's like I'm not eating raw I'm not eating raw food. And um, you know, for a week and I said, Well, uh, what are you gonna do about it? I'm the only person that cooks in the whole house or prepares food, I keep on saying cooking.
You know what I mean? So, like she's kind of like, other than when she's at work, she has no choice, really. Right. Right? So she's gonna do it.
Well, I mean, I don't understand her choices. Pizza. Order pizza and not eat what I'm eating. I see the most see here's the thing, right? It food is all about being social.
So if you you know, like eating something separate from what my family is eating is kind of the the worst idea in the world. I would rather eat nothing and go on a Gandhi fast than prepare something separate for myself and the rest of my family. Like the whole point of eating with your family is you eat together, not a bunch of separate micro meals, you know, that yeah, it doesn't that doesn't make any sense. Anyway, so yes, she's gonna she's gonna eat uh raw food with me for a week, and she'll probably stock up on uh hamburgers or whatnot when she's at work. Okay.
Uh I had a question last week that I did not answer uh on eggs. And the the question was uh what is in egg substitutes and uh because you know they he was having some problems uh with baking, using the egg substitutes for baking. So I did some research on it, and uh there's basically two different classes of uh egg substitute. The the one, which I think is the one you're using if you're actually using it to make omelets, is more like it's called uh like egg beaters, things like that. And they're not really a hundred percent egg substitute, they're not typically vegan, they're egg whites, and then they add uh flavoring and uh coloring and some other functional stuff to make it act more like an egg when you're scrambling it.
So what's in the egg beaters, it's 99% egg white apparently, and then the rest of it's color spice, salt, onion powder, xanthan gum, and guar gum. The xanthan and the guar are gonna modify the properties of the uh egg white and make it a little less hard uh and also you know, uh maybe give it some of the proper texture when it's being uh you know poured at poured out uh in into your pan. So that's what's gonna make it kind of act more like an omelet. The coloring is obviously gonna make it more, you know, um more omelet colored uh and the onion and whatnot is I guess just flavors that they think you want in there. Uh so that is basically the egg substitute, you know, if you're just if that's the one you're using, egg beaters.
Now, the reason that doesn't work well in baking for you is because they haven't added one of the prime things that is in uh eggs, and that is lecithin, right? So eggs contain a good bit of fat, which also you know help in baking to you know in you know make it taste better and and uh their their have functional properties, but there's the emulsifier lecithin uh and other different various uh phospholipids and things in there. So uh if you want to use those in conjunction uh you know with um with soy lecithin, which you can buy, right? That you can add a little bit of soy lecithin, and you'll probably get back a lot of the uh the same properties that you would get in an egg when you're when you're baking. So I would add, I don't know, uh it's so hard to tell.
I mean, I would add, you know, maybe half a percent by by volume or a percent on egg weight b uh volume of soy lecithin to try and get that um get that that texture back. I would buy the powdered soy lecithin so you don't have to um uh you don't have to heat it too much to get it in. You can with you know, blend it in with a stick blender and you should be able to get it in there, and that might help your your baked goods uh perform better. Now they make now the the the reason why they probably don't put the soy lecithin in there is because they don't want to add a soy product because it's gonna knock out a whole segment of their market if they put a soy product in, and most people aren't using it for baking. Most people who are using egg substitutes for baking are doing it because they want to go vegan.
They tip they don't want eggs. Either they're allergic to eggs or they want an actual vegan product. And so those are typically powders. And they're usually mixtures of modified starches like tapioca and potato starch. Uh there's the the NRG uh is like one of the famous brands people use.
Uh and it contains basically tapioca starch, uh, uh potato starch, calcium carbonate, which is uh a leavening agent. Uh I don't know why they use calcium carbonate and not other ones, but typically I would use that as a leavening agent, uh, but it's kind of specific. Citric acid, uh, sodium car carboxy methyl cellulose, which is uh modified cellulose product, which is going to provide viscosity in the batter, and methyl cellulose, which is going to provide viscosity in the batter, and also some gelation when uh the product is heated, and that's gonna provide a little bit of structure that uh the egg would be providing uh w while the batter is hot, while it's you know, while it's hot and being cooked, so when it cools down, whatever starches in your baked thing will have time to set. Now, I I did a cake with Johnny Azzini from John George based on this, you know, years ago, where we literally doped a whole whole ton of uh methylcel, not a whole ton, you know, like you know, point eight percent, into uh a cake and foamed it uh without adding a lot of uh egg white because we wanted to produce a sponge batter that didn't have that kind of protein bite to it, and so we use methylcel for the same property. So they're you know, they're basically including something that gels when it heats, but ungels when it unheats.
They're including thickeners uh and a little bit of a leavening agent because that's basically what eggs are doing in a in a baking system. So I hope this answers. Do you think that answers that I do a good job this week? Yes. Uh well, that's interesting.
So if you go to pure, I like that Nastasha is all all she's been thinking about this entire time is whether she gets to drink when we're on the raw food diet. Uh uh I believe you do. Uh the last time I was at uh Sarma's restaurant, uh pure pure food, right? Pure food, pure. Uh you know, they have wine, but you know, they they typically like all the wines were biodynamic and all that.
I I mean uh we don't have to go biodynamic though, right? That's not part of the part of the list. I don't think so. I don't understand. I like again, I'm gonna get a bunch of h of hate, you know, whatever X, Y, and Z, but I don't really understand the biodynamic thing myself.
It's like I understand I underst look. It's true that old school farming methods like you know, like the lunar cycles and all this other thing, and like planting based on like X, Y, and Z weather science. Sure, I'm sure they have some sort of basis in fact generated by centuries of trial and error, uh, and you know, wisdom handed down from the ages. Boom. Yes.
Do I believe this? Yes. But like taking a horn and like packing it with manure and then burying it in your field doesn't make any dang any dang sense to me at all. You know what I mean? Like that seems like hocum.
No? Yeah. But but I think that, and I've said this before, I think what's good about it is that if you're spending the time to go out in your fields and bury a horn full of donkey poo in your field, I think it means that you're paying more attention to your crops, which is probably gonna make you have a better product. So it's not like that you don't necessarily end up making a better product this way. It's just that um, you know, it's just uh you know, it's not because of the horn and the donkey poo.
The other thing that's really interesting is I think that a lot of people who are uh are interested in in you know, biodynamics, organics of they never do blind taste tests. I'll never forget this. I went to a wine tasting and uh the you know, the person was handing out these uh completely organic biodynamic wines, right? And they were saying, you know, this wine was produced in a field, and the field is overgrown with all sorts of natural vegetation, and it was awesome, all this. It was so is full of life and then crickets and frogs and birds and you know, all this stuff, right?
And then he's like, and the one next door, it looked totally barren. They had used you know chemicals on it, and there's nothing growing but the grapes. It was you know, completely unlifelike, there was no blah blah blah. And I was like, oh, wow. So you tasted them side by side, and you really notice a difference in the wine.
So he's like, ah, why would I taste that wine? I was like, what? What? The whole point is you taste the two wines and you prove that your method does a better job. So we need to find someone who actually knows that situation.
You can find two producers with very similar soils and climates and varieties, like everything same same, but one's doing the biodynamic action and one's not, and then we do a side by side. That's interesting to me. Would that be interesting to you? Yeah. So if any of you out there have this capability, please call uh or uh write in.
So anyway, let's go to our uh first commercial break. But remember to call in your questions to 718 497 2128 718 497 2128 cooking issues. How you feel, brother? Feeling good. You feel good?
So much bone, brother. How you feel, man? I'm feeling all right. I don't want all people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella?
Sure getting down. Look at him! We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time.
We're gonna have a bump good time. We've gotta take you high. All right. You wanna do it again? Yeah, that you won't.
We've gotta take you high. Now I won't have a body. Let Brad blow up my two cores. And then I want to wave you and let's go into it with dinner. Yeah, alright.
I'm gonna get that belly with a little horn over there. Brad, get a take us higher. Yeah. Take us higher. Brad!
Brad! Brad! Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Calling your questions to you. 718497-2128.
That's 7184972128. Coming to you live today from the refrigerated trailer that is Roberta's Pizzeria Radio Station. Please come out and eat at the restaurant, though. The restaurant's nice and toasty. It's just the radio station that's uh a refrigerated storage unit.
Perhaps Patrick's storing his meat here from the uh Heritage Food, and that's why it has to be so cold. Okay. Um now I have a question, uh second time question from Max. Uh, and again, some of it uh is unprintable. Uh so he says he, you know what, I we used a phrase, and maybe Nastasha can say it so I don't have to say it this time for stick blender.
Dildo stick. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And uh he said, don't worry about that, but it you know, if you if you if you don't want to use that, he gives me a word. I'm not really sure what what language it is, but um I I'm a little worried, knowing Max's questions.
I'm a little worried to actually say it for fear that I might be saying something, but he says it translated to lopsided carrot as a as the stick blender. That's the slang he uses anyone. Anywho, uh, he has an interesting question. Uh and his question is, uh, why not pig's milk? It and this, Max, is an excellent question, and you you've been worried about it for for years, as have I, although you seem to have actually, you know, arrived at the same answer I did, and uh also, you know, spoken to more people about it, perhaps at more pig farmers.
Because if you spoke to at least one, you've spoken to more than I have. But the um uh the the the question that always comes to mind is we have yaks milk cheese, we have camels milk cheese, we have cow's milk cheese, we have goats' milk cheese, we have sheep's milk cheese. Can you think of any other animals? They like no, right? I mean, basically m domestic animals, uh, they make milk and you get cheese out of them.
Why is there no pig milk and or and or pig cheese, right? Now, uh the kind of the answer I'd always you know come up with in my head and spoken to, you know, s I actually have spoken to some pig farmers. But the the the answer is is that hey, look, when a pig gives birth, you use the milk uh from that pig to feed the piglets straight up, you know, and then you take them off of the uh when they take them off, you wean the wean the pig off of uh meaning the pig stops lactating so that you can have pigs again, because pigs, unlike other animals, are really meat machines. You know what I mean? It's not they're not kind of multi-use animals.
I mean we get leather out of it, sure, boars bristles and and whatnot, but compared to the cow where we get milk, where we get leather, you know, a lot of leather, uh, or compared to the you know, the sheep or or the goat where we can get wool and we can get meat and we can get milk, or the chicken where we can get meat and egg, the pig is a meat machine. You know, it takes garbage and c well it used to take garbage and crap that you would otherwise not be able to use and convert it into meat that your family can eat. And so I think the idea was is that you want to fatten up the little pigs to get them into meat uh as fast as possible. Another interesting thing that I did not know uh Max and thank you for bringing it up is um that pigs don't produce nearly the amount of milk that uh cows produce you know per per body per you know percent body weight uh well actually maybe for percent body weight but he Max says that the average pig is going to produce 13 pounds of milk a day as opposed to a cow that produces 65 pounds of milk per day. Yeah but you know what Max a a cow is a whole hell of a lot bigger than a pig.
I mean a lot unless you have a giant like super fat pig. So if you were going to breed a fairly young uh a sow that was like on the range of like 200 pounds or something like that like which is normal about slaughter weight you're gonna breed at once I mean to get you know 13 pounds of milk out of that as opposed to you know a cow that weighs you know well over a thousand pounds doesn't seem like such a bad like such a bad trade right I think a lot of it goes to the fact that you know they just use it to feed the the pigs. Now if I had someone with a lot of money sure I would either mechanically you know feed those pigs something else if that's even possible I don't even know and then just take the milk. I mean Max I think that you know next next I don't know where you where you live but next time you're around maybe we can find someone and just run an experiment. I mean you could probably pay a farmer the like if you if you paid the farmer the entire cost of the litter of pigs that was going to be fed off of this pig, I am you know certain that he or she would sell the milk and then you could taste it, see whether it's delicious and uh and make some cheese out of it.
I mean, um, you know, uh I think that's entirely entirely reasonable, right? What do you think? There was to you know, not to get you know gross about it, but there was a chef, I forget who it was in New York, who was uh using his wife's breast milk uh to prepare things, but I think that was just a gimmick. I mean, that's gotta be a gimmick. I mean, I've you know, I have two kids.
Listen, uh no, I have two kids, and I I'll tell you, you know, that if you if you have kids and and your your wife or or you, if you're a woman, you know, had to basically, you know, pump milk so that you could go to work and then feed the kid the milk, then you know, this stuff is like a super precious commodity. This is not something that you're taking to the restaurant and turning into dairy products. This is like liquid gold that you treasure and when you accidentally leave one out and it and it goes bad on the counter, you you know, you you s you know, you you you're you know, racked with grief and and horror and pain, you know what I mean? So it's not like something that I think you would normally normally do. But if a chef can do that, then you can definitely get some pig milk.
And if you get your hands on some, Max, please, you know, let me in on it. At least call me, send me an email, and tell me how the stuff worked out because uh, you know, I'm dying to know, right? Nastasha's not saying anything. I I told you she doesn't want to speak on the air. It's not me.
It's not me. Um what? Okay. So uh hey, look, this is all in good tone, by the way. This is still a family show.
I've not said anything. Anyway. Uh Ben writes in and says, Some recipes, particularly uh particularly many Middle Eastern recipes for basmati rice and most Asian recipes for short grain rice, call for you to rinse, soak, and or drain rice before cooking. Other rices and recipes tell you strictly never to wash rice. What does washing do for the final product?
Is there any reason to use uh one rice uh washing method over another? Does the type of rice affect this decision, the temperature of the water, etc., etc.? Yes. There. No.
So there's the problem is is that every culture uh has their own style of rice cooking and also their own style of rice that they're using. Here in the U.S., right, if you're if you're using a um an enriched rice that they enrich with uh, you know, with with you know nutrients and stuff like that, a lot of them are basically dusted on. So then if you were to rinse the rice, you would rinse off all of that all of that stuff. Now, that's not an issue so much if you're using uh rice that hasn't been enriched, or if you use rice that's been enriched with uh, you know, I think they have one where they spray it like almost like a wax or an oil base in it or something like that, where it stays in better with rinsing. So I think when someone tells you specifically specifically not to rinse it, what they're doing is they're uh basically saying don't wash off the nutrients, I would guess, right?
Now the reason to rinse rice is because during the milling process of rice, uh there is excess uh bran and starch that's on left on the outside of the rice. There's also, you know, some of the rice is processed in some pretty nasty conditions. You know, you know, it could have twigs, it could have rocks, it could have dirt, it could have, you know, animal or other types of bad products in it. So uh rinsing is a good step to clean it out. And in fact, if you take uh rice and rinse it, uh most any rice that you can get, the rice turns cloudy really quickly, which means that there's a lot of soluble starch that's coming off of it, or at least some sort of soluble powder.
Back in the day, they also told you to rinse it because uh when they were milling it or uh and s and sending it out, they would have uh a little bit of talcon to uh increase the kind of whiteness and also I think as a milling aid, and you need to wash the talc out. So the rinsing step is most often to get rid of starch that's on the uh outside or that might that might you know interfere with things. And uh so you know if you take a Japanese rice, right, which is somewhat sticky to begin with, but you don't want it, you don't want the grains to be all glopped together, right? Then you're in a situation where, hey, look, you're gonna do a lot of rinsing of this rice, especially because they don't cook it in a lot of boiling water, right? There's not that much point in um in rinsing your rice if you're going to cook it in an excess of boiling water, like it's done in some in some in Indian recipes.
Because uh if you're gonna cook it in an excess of boiling water, right, the starch that is going to come off is gonna be relatively diluted unless it's quite dirty, in which case maybe you have to rinse it anyway. But if you're gonna cook it in uh either steamed or small amount of water, right, like like you would like a small amount of water for Japanese cooking, if you don't wash off that rice and there's any starch on the outside, then it's gonna become sticky because the rice already has that that medium grain rice already has a bit of stickiness to it. So to get it to be exactly the right texture, you want to wash it until the water runs clear and there's no more starch coming off of it. And that's where those instructions come from. Now, um you know, other types of rice, I don't think it's gonna matter one way or the other uh too much.
So for instance, like you know, and and and coming to soaking and cooking technique, a lot depends on the on the type of rice. Soaking right your rice as opposed to washing it, you wash it and then you might soak it. Soaking it is helpful in situations where you want to either not use as much fuel because you want to get some of the water in before you start cooking, or it also helps because any sort of water pre-soaking into the rice is gonna make the cook time quicker and also more even. So if you have a rice, it tends to split open on the outside before the inside is cooked, right? Then if you soak it beforehand, you're going to get a much uh faster and more even cook, and the rice is going to come out better.
Similarly, with a sticky rice that's steamed, right, you soak it beforehand because if you don't, it's going to be hard for the steaming method to uh to get the uh you know get more moisture in. So the pre-soak on a steaming thing like that really helps cooking uh sticky rice. Now, on a parboiled rice, right? The reason why you can boil parboiled rice in a lot of water for a long time, and you know, it gets a bad name in this country because it's called converted rice, you know, like Uncle Ben's converted bran rice. It gets a bad name here because people think it's some sort of newfangled like like bull schnazz.
But in fact, right, it's uh an ancient and fantastic technique where you take whole rice, whole, you know, in still in the hull, and you boil it for a period of time in the hull, and you actually increase the nutrient content of your rice by boiling in the hull because you get some of the well, so they say, I haven't really actually read the studies, but you uh you know, you get some of the nutrient from the hull into the rice. Also, you pre gelatinize some of that rice starch. Then when you cool it down, it uh what's called retrogrades, recrystallizes, and becomes resistant to swelling and bursting again. So parboiled rice actually doesn't necessarily cook faster. The ones that cook faster are also uh sometimes parboiled and then pre-boiled again and dried, right?
So that they're basically they're pre cooked, which is different really from parboiled, and they cook very fast, like minute rice, things like that. But traditional parboiled rice, which they have a you know, a lot of Indian rices that are parboiled, uh, don't actually uh cook uh faster, I don't think, although I'd have to go back and check it. It's been a long time since I've looked at a recipe. But um the interesting thing about them is that they don't rupture or break apart. The grains stay firm and together, even if they're cooked for a long time, and even if they're cooked in a lot of water.
So there it's a very good technique to get uh individual grains. They have a lot of bounce, they're harder in texture, even though they're cooked, uh, because the starches basically you want to think of them as being kind of preset or or you know, kind of strengthened this uh by this this technique of parboiling, uh cooling it, uh starch retrograding, then milling it and and then cooking it again. Uh so there's a lot to do and uh it with rice. It's extremely complicated. It's based on you know the type of rice you're using, the culture you're dealing with, and and and the recipe you're using.
I think if your rice is coming out sticky, you're gonna be better off, and you don't want it to be, you maybe you could benefit from some rinsing. If you don't want to rinse, right, uh, and you do like Japanese style, you can buy what's called the rinse-free rice, and it has a Japanese word, which if I had it in front of me, I would attempt to pronounce, but I won't because I won't pronounce it out of my head because I'll get it wrong, and then everyone will laugh at me. But rinse-free rice uses a kind of newer uh milling technology that allows you to have a Japanese rice that has all of that uh extra starch and and and brand coating on the outside completely uh removed without the need for rinsing. Mushim, I'm not I'm not gonna try I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do it. Anyway, uh so it it all depends.
I wish I could have a hard and fast answer for you, but uh it's there is no hard and fast answer. It's just knowing what the variables are and um kind of how they how they interact. Um is that useful at all, you think? Yeah. Yeah?
Yes. Yeah. All right. All right, we'll go to our second commercial break. Call in your questions to 718 497 2128.
That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. Oh, how you feel, brother? You feel good? So much bone, brother. How you feel, man?
I feel all right. I don't want to people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Hey, yeah. Sure getting down.
We're gonna have a punk good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. We're gonna have a bump good time. Let's take them up, Brad.
We've gotta take you high. All right. Yeah, that's the wrong. We gotta take you high. Brother.
Yeah. Now I won't have a body. Let's bread blow up by two courses. And then I'm gonna wave you in. Let's go and fill that with dinner.
Now all right. Come on, get that belly with a little horn over there. Brad, get it, take us higher. Yeah. Take us higher.
Brad. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Call on your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-212-878-878-8. We heard from uh Ken Ingber.
He was the uh gentleman that uh called in about his uh his uh mom's turkey, uh which was left out in the stoop, I believe in was it Brooklyn or Queens? Brooklyn. Brooklyn. And uh and you know, the question was why didn't uh why didn't he die? And you know, I thought that was an interesting question, and so um, and he's still alive, thank God.
So he emailed us uh uh another one. He had a question about um the Araby. And the Araby is a coffee machine, I believe it's called an Araby. It's a coffee machine uh invented by the same guy that invented the it's not called an Araby, is it? It's called the the Aerobi, the little frisbee that came out like in the eighties that's like a little ring that you can throw like the length of a whole football field, even if you're like a tiny kid.
Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? Jeez, man, I'm old. Anyway, so this guy invented a coffee machine. Uh uh, I guess it is called the Airby.
Anyway, so it's a coffee machine where he you know he he basically said, Look, uh, I want to increase the amount of pressure in uh in the brewing chamber so that I can force the coffee through and and thereby I guess get better extraction. So it's very simple mechanism. It's a piston that you drive the uh hot water through your through the puck, right? Uh and produce uh coffee. Now, the the question has always been, is this espresso?
And I I'm saying this, I still Nastasha, let's just buy one of these dang things. Are they expensive? They're like 40 bucks. We'll charge it to the school. Let's buy well anyway.
Well, no, seriously, we'll buy it and we'll experiment with it because I've gotten enough questions from it that I've never tried it, so I feel kind of like a moron every time I talk about it. But it's it's uh, you know, it it it's by all accounts a good product, but the question is does it make espresso? And my answer is uh no, because and and of course Ken calls me out on this and he goes, Well, part of the controversy is semantic because if you define espresso as a beverage brewed at 195, there's a range there, but yeah, at nine bars, also a range, with a mousetail out of the portafilter, then a device that brews at 175 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what the aerobia apparently does, with moderate hand pressure, it can't make espresso espresso. And that's true. Uh I that's what I'm saying, but I don't think it's merely semantic, because if you look at uh if you look at um the book um The Chemistry of Quality, Espresso Espresso, the Chemistry of Coffee by Andrea Ely, which is I believe available again.
It was uh unavailable for a couple of years and is available again. There are numerous charts and graphs showing extraction and the type of not just the the like how much is extracted, but what is extracted at varying different pressures and temperatures. So you're you know, it's not gonna be the same cup of coffee because brewing kinetics is extremely complicated. Uh and you know, in the new year, if I ever find time, I have a lot to do with with it with espresso and pressures and things like that. But it's extremely complicated.
So I'm not saying that it can't make a fantastic cup of coffee and maybe the best mocha style pot, you know, coffee ever. But I also wouldn't call, and I don't dislike by the way, mocha pot means those little kind of octagonal things that you put on your stove and the water boils up through them and makes coffee as mocha pot. Everyone know what I'm talking about. Um they're cheap, they're fine. Those things are they're fine, they're great.
They make a decent cup of coffee for what they are for a mocha cup of coffee, right? They are a short uh strong cup of coffee. However, to me, that does not mean that it is espresso. That is a different animal entirely, right? So I'm not saying it doesn't make a great cup of coffee.
And I and I I shouldn't even talk about it until I get one, but I feel like I should address your your question now. Um I don't feel that it could possibly make the same thing as uh as an espresso. At least not of course, nine tensity espresso you get out uh anywhere is direct anyway, and so you might as well make it any dang way because the people who make it you know care not a whit for how it's made or what it tastes like. You know? Yeah.
Like like nine nine t nine times out of ten you go and someone's pulling a shot in like fifteen seconds or forty-five seconds, and they don't really care that you know the you know what the shot time is, they're not really accurate with their dosing, they're not really accurate with their tamping, their grinders aren't adjusted properly. I mean, a any one of those variables throw off in your espresso is not gonna be the same, at which point, you know, maybe you might as well just make it out of a forty, you know, a forty dollar pot. Which is which is not to be disparaging on the forty dollar thing. I really want to get one experiment with it. Maybe maybe it'll change my life and you know, I'll throw away my La San Marco espresso machine.
Anyway, I don't know. Uh I uh but it definitely needs some experimentation. And he also pointed me to a really interesting um little uh thing on Coffee Geek, which is a fantastic website, by the way. I've I love Coffee Geek. Uh I've been going to it for a long, long time.
I lurk there, I never really comment, but it's a fantastic site. And um uh point to a person who's measuring their coffee extraction using a refractometer, which is I've heard about before, but I've never actually done it, and again, now I feel foolish for not having done it, because w one of the main you know, quality characteristics in coffee is how much stuff you're extracting out of the coffee bean, and the way one of the ways you could test this obviously is by measuring how much stuff other than water is in the coffee when you're done. And uh a lot of people use what's called a total dissolved solids meter that's basically measuring the conductivity to to do this. And instead, this other gentleman whose name escapes me, is using a refractometer, which seems like a fantastic uh technique and a really great way for someone at home or even in a restaurant to make sure that their coffee is staying on point, at least in terms of extraction. But remember, even at the same level of total extraction, right, out of coffee, it doesn't mean you're extracting the same thing, right?
At different temperatures, different things are going to extract differently. So if you get, let's say, whatever you're going to get, like, you know, 10% extraction out of the coffee, right? Bean, right? Let's say you get that. Well, who's to say that it's the same 10%?
You're just measuring, you don't know that you don't know the distribution of, you know, of the different elements that you're sucking out of the coffee and how that's affected by the pressure and the temperature. So to measure uh the performance of a machine strictly based on uh extraction in terms of what it reads on a refractometer, I think is missing what uh, you know, the full kind of gestalt of what's going on in espresso. And it also harks back to, you know, I think a real problem with all of food science, which is, you know, we often uh, you know, I read, I read food science, and you need to make metrics. You need to quantify what you're doing in order to have a result, in order to have repeatability, especially in industrial commercial scale. But often these measurements, which are trying to measure are very something very specific, like crispness, they're trying to measure like how, you know, how hard it is to break and deform a crust, let's say, or total dissolved solids, or any one of a number of things.
These metrics um are really measuring something that isn't a single variable, but are controlled by a wide variety of uh different things that are going on within food systems. I mean, the reason that food systems and drink systems are so interesting, other than the fact that they're delicious and we eat them every day, is that there's such a richness to be encountered with a very small number of ingredients, starting ingredients. And so, you know, it's very hard to get uh uh a set of metrics. It's actually going to work as well as looking at it with your eyes, feeling it with your hands, and tasting it with your mouth, because in the end, right, that is all we really care about, right? I mean, the the the repeatability, the metrics, the thermometers, all which I all love.
I love I said, because I love any gadget. Anyone knows me loves a I love any gadget. But the, you know, like all of that is only an aid uh to trying to uh you know get get to the best instrument of all, which is your tongue and your nose and your eyes. Uh so that's my my feeling. On the other hand, I'm gonna go out and get a refractometer that I can measure my coffee with.
Right? Mm-hmm. Anyway. Um so I think in the time that we have left, I will discuss uh uh alkal alkalinity and uh some interesting things I think that we've been working on. Last week, uh someone asked a question about Myard reactions, and I somehow got into a riff on Thai uh lime water, right?
Remember that? Yeah. And uh so uh I read this website uh by uh it's called She Simmers, she's a uh blog, and she had a uh you know a bunch of stuff on Thai cooking. I think her her f she is Thai or her family is Thai, and uh they use this uh limestone water, which is slaked lime, calcium hydroxide, and they do numerous things. I've used it for years to harden bananas up when I'm gonna you know make a foster or something like that, so that the bananas get a cooked taste but they don't break up.
Apparently, it can also be used for pumpkins. Uh but she uses it, and apparently it's traditionally to be used in frying batters as well. And I was extremely interested in uh in that because she says it makes it crispier now. Uh in a rice in a rice flour situation. Uh we have tested that and I haven't we haven't gotten any conclusive answers, right, Nastasha?
Right, yeah. I mean Nastasha preferred the one with the with the lime water in it because she likes the flavor of the lime water, which is reminiscent of pretzels or reminiscent of a tortilla, because it's got this calcium hydroxide, this lye kind of flavor that Nastasha really liked. But it didn't seem like it was any crispier. No. And it also didn't seem like it browned any faster.
I was thinking it was going to brown a lot faster because alkalinity accelerates myard reactions. Right. Well, yeah, we have to run all those again. Yeah, we have to again and again and again and again. Uh you know, because of that question on myard reactions, I'm now in like a probably a five-month K-hole of worried about alkalinity and noodles and um, you know, and batters and frying.
Because it turns out that that this lie, you know, the use of alkaline cooking methods is goes across uh kind of you know, the world and culture was was used in various places completely separately from each other. So when I started reading about this Thai red lime paste and it came to my you know attention that it's basically just calcium hydroxide, well, calcium hydroxide is cal, right? Is what the what is used in um you know, you know, south of the border here, uh Mexico and Central America uh to and you know, I guess South America to uh nixdomilize corn, right? And so uh nyxtamalization is the reason why everybody who lived here isn't dead, right? Because uh it you know, w if your main staple is corn, right, uh and you don't know how to nyxtamalize, which is also the best word in the English language, right?
It's not even English, but this is the best nixtimalization. That's like a that's an awesome word, am I right? Yeah. So if you if you don't uh uh and the way nixtimalization works is you take calcium hydroxide, you you put uh that in water with dried corn, uh you heat it for a while, and then you let it steep. And what happens is from a functional standpoint, uh it makes it easier to mill and to grind because it in uh back in the day they would be grinding uh the corn after it was uh you know boiled and soaked on something called uh matate mano, which is like this like stone thing with like uh the mono is like a square thing, and they would grind it that way directly from the corn grains into the masa that you would make the tortilla out of or whatever you were grinding it to make tamales or whatever.
And uh, and so I'm buying one by the way today. Yeah, anyway, going to Nastasha's neighborhood to buy one. Anyway, uh so the basically it was easier for them to mill. It also the alkalinity uh softened the husk on the outside of the of the corn and also thereby making it easier to mill. But uh the the process of boiling and soaking in uh in alkaline solution, because calcium hydroxide is alkaline, did two other things uh uh well, one more functional thing.
It made the dough easier to work. If you don't, if you just take cornmeal and mix it with water, it doesn't have the right texture uh of uh masa, right? Uh partially the boiling pre uh pre gelatinizes the starch a little bit, and so that helps the uh the dough stick together, provides some structure that it doesn't, it would, you know, you because there's no gluten, you need some structure in the dough. And so pre-gelatinizing some of the starch on the outside of the corn kernel in the beginning of the boiling procedure uh helps to do that. And also treating it with uh the the um alkaline solution, the calcium hydroxide, uh that also causes the starch to be able to hold the hold more water, right?
And so it inc improves the dough uh capability. So it holds more water, it's gonna feel drier for a particular uh for particular water concentration, and it all all in all makes the dough easier to handle, uh easier to form into uh into tortilla. And so without nictimalization, there is no real tortilla production, right? But here is the kicker. It also makes niacin available in the corn that was not available beforehand.
So you get a bunch of Europeans showing up and they ship the corn over to Europe and they grow it, right? And it was cheap and easy to grow, so they grow it and they start eating a largely corn-based diet, and they all get pillagra because they're not getting the niacin because the dunces don't look and see that you know there's this procedure that's been done for you know millennia, literally millennia, right, of nixtimalization. They don't think that's important. They think that they can just take the the crank uh the grain crop, corn, and build a whole culture around it without doing the nyxtimalization, and as a result we get pallagra. So this is a process, it also has another effect is that in it in a culture that was probably deficient in milk at the time prior to the domestication of uh milk-producing animals, to go back to Max's question, uh the calcium hydroxide also radically increases the amount of calcium that's uh in the tortilla because the calcium goes into the corn.
And so all of a sudden now you have a lot more calcium available to the system, you have a uh a lot easier problem uh thing to work with as a dough, and you have uh and you have niacin. So it's good, it's all good. Now, I became interested in this uh because I'm interested in all things uh like that. And so we started nixtimalizing things based, you know, based on the fact that we're playing around with it, using Thai red lime paste. I'm now uh we're gonna tomorrow or the day after, we're gonna tour tort uh tortilleria nixtamal, which is like the only place in New York that uses its own uh um makes its own nixta mal.
I'm getting a matate because I did some nixtimalization of popcorn, which is weak. Don't try to do it with popcorn, it's not the right kind of corn. I've read on the internet that it w it works fine, it does not work fine, it doesn't I mean it works fine, but it doesn't mill very well. And without the stone grinder, the the metate mano, I over the weekend when I was making uh tortilla for you know my family for for Sunday dinner, I blew out my Vitaprep like three times. I blew out my cuisin art.
It was a kinghell mess, and I still didn't get the texture exactly right. So today when I pick up the official Mexican grinder, I'll tell you whether or not, you know, next week hopefully whether or not it works. But I'm also interested in nixtimalizing other grains other than corn for just for for giggles, right? So what you know, we've done barley, we've done uh rye, and we've done wheat, and I've had some success and some failure, and we'll come back on it. But uh basically we made something that was made with rye that had it had a rye flavor, which Nastasha doesn't like unfortunately because she doesn't like things that are delicious, and but also the flavor of uh tortilla, right?
So the a lot of the tortilla flavor, what what differentiates it from just you know, uh uh corn meal cake is that lye cooking has a characteristic flavor, right? And so next time you bite into a tortilla. Think about the difference between that and unnyxtimalized corn and that flavor. And so I was achieving that flavor in other grains. Uh now we haven't yet done the control side by side of whether just boiling it for the same length of time without using the lime is going to produce the same kind of batter.
But this is what we're working on in uh in cooking issues. We want to bring nixtimalization to the next level. We're new uh like usual, we're not content with just learning, which we're gonna do on Thursday from the people, real people who do it every day. So that you know it's always best to go visit someone who does it every day so that you can get a feel for what it's like to do it right. I mean, it sure beats the you know four hundred pages of nixtimalization crap I read in the scientific literature that I downloaded off of my illegal connection to Columbia's uh servers.
But the um the you know uh nothing beats going and touching the real stuff, eating it, tasting it. I will have practiced with my matate mano by the time we make it to it. And next week, this time, you I mean, I won't be a master. Also, I'm not gonna use a tortilla press because it seems to me like that's like a sissy move. I need to learn to be like a a Mexican grandma.
My goal in life, other than you know, like doing a good job on this raw food thing that we're gonna do, you know, is I, you know, and this is a longtime life goal is to become a uh a Mexican grandma. So that means I need I already have a mocojete in my house, the little stone grinder, which I've had for years, and you know, the little like you know, mortar pestle. Uh I've had one of those for, you know, I don't know, 10 years, 12 years. So now when I get this grinder, I'm one step closer. And when I can form tortillas effortlessly by hand without a press, I am and but then I have to learn Spanish.
And if I once I learn Spanish, I will officially be a Mexican grandma. Uh and uh with that, I will tell you to go. We have a new post up to go check it out. It's uh on pears. Uh Nastasha and I did a great pear tasting, and I finally posted on it months later because I'm a lazy weasel.
Cooking issues. Ficious fish is back.
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